Medical Pioneer. He will be remembered for the medical break-through of developing the quinine pill, which prevented and cured malaria, a disease that was locally prominent in the swampy areas along the Mississippi River near his home. Prior to quinine, malaria had been treated with "bleeding" the patient or prescribing mercury. Eventually, his medication ended these dangerous and ineffectual procedures. Quinine also treated scarlet fever, yellow fever, and influenza. In 1844 he published the medical treatise "The Theory and Treatment of Fevers", which helped educate other physicians about the disease as well as other fevers. This was credited as the first medical textbook to be published west of the Mississippi River. He was the son of Dr. Mark and Rebecca Sappington. His father studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and also taught medicine to several of his sons. The family relocated to the pioneer territory of Tennessee where physicians were in demand. After becoming a physician, he relocated to Franklin, Tennessee to open his own medical practice and where he married Jane Breathitt in 1804. The couple had two boys and seven girls. In 1819, the family migrated west to the small town of Arrow Rock in Saline County, Missouri becoming very prosperous with two dry goods stores, a loan company, a lumber mill, along with a medical practice with a laboratory for developing quinine. Land in the wildness was cheap, and he purchased a vast amount of land with slaves to work it. He developed a huge empire that maintained the family for many decades. Several of his daughters married men who would became Missouri Governors. The 8th Governor of Missouri Meredith Miles Marmaduke married Lavania Sappington in 1826. Their son, John Sappington Marmaduke, was a Confederate Major General during the American Civil War and after the war, became the 25th Governor of Missouri. The 15th Governor of Missouri Claiborne Fox Jackson married three of his daughters: Jane on February 17, 1831, but she died five months later; Louisa on September 23, 1833, but she died five years later shortly after giving birth to a son; and last, an older sister, Eliza, on May 1838, and she outlived him by two years. Both Marmaduke and Jackson were involved at one time with the marketing and distributing the medication quinine. Since Missouri was still a western frontier and public school were nonexistent, he wanted to support a school system. He had hope that the state would furnish land for schools but that did not happen. In 1853, he established the Sappington School Fund through a personal donation of $20,000. This school fund is still active today helping established college funds for students and helped to establish the Missouri Valley State College.